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Transportation

A new report from PennPIRG Education Fund finds that Pennsylvania is set to receive $110.7 million from the groundbreaking federal settlement with Volkswagen (VW) over the company's emissions scandal; the state is being directed to use these funds to develop a cleaner transportation system. The report from PennPIRG Education Fund recommends that the best use of these funds would be devoted toward advancing a network of electric vehicle charging stations for the state’s highways along with an aggressive expansion of all-electric transit buses to replace aging, dirty, diesel buses.

Despite news stories claiming that Millennials are buying up cars at record rates, the reality is quite different. After adjusting previous studies to account for differences in the size of the generations measured, on a per-capita basis, Millennials are 29 percent less likely than members of Generation X to own a car.

Statement by Mike Litt, Consumer Program Advocate at U.S. PIRG Education Fund, on todays announced VW settlement. For more details on what a strong settlement agreement ought to look like, please see the open letter that we released earlier this week with other consumer and environmental groups.

Given that expanding highways at great public cost doesn’t improve rush-hour traffic, there are better ways to spend this money, argue report authors Jeff Inglis of Frontier Group and John C. Olivieri of U.S. PIRG. They identify a dozen road projects, costing $24 billion in all, that are “representative” of the problem.

The new study details how despite America’s massive repair and maintenance backlog, and in defiance of America’s changing transportation needs, state governments across the country, including Pennsylvania’s, continue to spend billions each year on new and wider highways.